2 closets, one building, lets replicate?

[brentc]

The sales chat doesn't appear to ever have anyone manning it. I don't like talking to sales staff on the phone while I'm in the early stages of reviewing possible options, so I'll post my question(s) here.

The setup:
Small business with large single location. All on prem services, but do already have offsite backup solution. HA not required or desired. No SAN, local storage only. 2 hyper-v hosts, one prod one DR.

Looking for a software solution to take snapshots of the VM from prod and save to DR so if prod fails, can spin up the few VM on DR host that have been saved by said software for quicker recovery than pulling things down from cloud. Constant replication not necessary, can be on a 24 hour schedule if it helps on cost.

Is veeam the direction to go or is another (possibly cheaper) solution more fit for our needs? This is honestly probably the simplest setup ever.

Thanks for any input.

[nielsengelen]

This is perfectly possible with Veeam. You can use the replication feature within VBR. You can download a trial and give it a spin. It is easy to use and flexible.

[brentc]

Thank you for replying. Sorry for the newbie-ish questions, has been quite a bit since I touched the product (good couple years now I think).

I'll have to check things out and test in my home lab. I have 2 older hosts with 5 VM total I can test with.

In my lab host1 has 4 VM, including primary DC while host2 just has secondary DC. Does this mean I would be running 2 instances so I should download the community version or does each VM count too?

Also can I criss-cross them? Aka if host1 fails I can fire up the snapshots that have been backed up on/to host2 as well as if host2 dies my secondary DC could be spun up on host1?

Thanks.

[nielsengelen]

You should be fine with 1 community edition to back up or replicate those VM's. You can install VBR on host 1 and add both hosts to the VBR console so you can protect them both. You can then also replicate between them. Which means in regards to the criss-cross, if you replicate the VM's from host 1 to host 2 - you can power on the VM's on host 2 when host 1 fails.

[brentc]

I already installed it on host 2, should I remove it and install on host 1 instead?

[nielsengelen]

No, that is fine. U can run it on either one.